M42

[griz11]

Man what an awesome night. Everything fell right into place tonight. Mount worked perfectly set up early and found targets quick so I was able to take lots of subs. This one blew me away when I first saw it in DSS.

I'm so glad I got back into this hobby. Figured I'd be months before getting this quality. I've had some good help. Tutorials and constructive comments have really moved everything along.

Griz

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Loads of photons gathered! Center a bit bright (can probably be fixed), but lots of detail in the outlying regions

[Gina]

Great start   I agree with Michael's comment.  This is a very difficult object to process, with enormous contrast.  Some shorter subs suitably blended in using layers are the usual way to show the centre.

[graemlourens]

Hey Griz

Very nice picture, amazing

May i ask what setup you used, and what exposure times & light-amounts you took?

Aswell, how were you lightpollution conditions?

Would be interesting to know for me as beginner to have a reference

Kind regards, Graem

[griz11]

I have a Canon 7D with 400mm lens mounted on a Losmandy Starlapse mount. 15 lights 300sec ISO800. Yea I'll have to get some more shots next time with a lower exposure to blend. Had to pinch myself a few times when I first saw this one. DLSR's work so well for this. I'm sure glad I took the plunge and got back into AP. And so many more targets out there once you get the technique down.

Griz

[PatrickGilliland]

I love it when a plan comes together - its nice when it all works isn't it

Great progress so far - light comments above are correct - try some very short subs (I do 30 and 60 seconds on my CCD) then blend them in with PS or similar - aim so you can see the four bright stars right inside the brightest bit.  Not sure what software you have but PS with layers or PI pixelmath will sort for you and reveal a lot of hidden detail.

Without being over picky a few more subs will help with the noisy areas as well.

Sample below of what I mean - but great work and rapid iprogress well done.

Paddy

[griz11]

Light conditions are pretty good here. Except off to the east where this was. I use an Astronomik CLS clip in filter all the time. You can see the milky way clearly here and big stuff like Andromeda. The club I belong too has a dark site about 20 min from here. Once I get everything working and my workflow down I'll be going there to get the real faint stuff. To the west its very dark no towns for 30-40 miles and they are small less than 10k people. From my experience with these two images lots of subs fixes lots of sins. The noise really goes down and the graininess goes way down. I'm a pretty good photographer but this is all new. That was my 6th attempt. I have something to work with now to run through some tutorials I've been told about on how to bring out faint detail and such. I'm going to have a lot of fun with this I can tell. People have been very helpful on the forums I frequent. I work hard at anything I'm interested in but my rapid progress on this has a lot to do with the help and encouragement I've been getting. Can't wait to see what they look like after a year of doing them.

Griz

[griz11]

Hey Paddy didn't see you before I posted that last one. That is my next target. Tried to find it last night. The Argo will be here in a few days and if my DIY encoder works I won't have that problem any more. I've been taking a short exposure image and uploading to nova.astrometry.net to get a plate solve to help with positioning. That comes in real handy. But it still takes me way to long to find my targets that way. And I want precise positioning so I can go back and reimage and not loose anything becuase I wasn't on the same position when I stack them. I want to do some narrowband work. I was going to get some shorter ones last night but I was getting tired and when my batt went dead I just called it a night. The clouds were starting to form as well. I know how to do the layering from my motorsports shots. The one I just placed 1st runner up with in the FIA contest was done using the same process. Just signed up for the photographers deal on Adobe so I finally have Ps to work with too. But lots of tall learning curves on the software. I'm only proficient with Lightroom now. I can tell you one thing your first decent looking image is kinda like seeing Saturn for the first time through a telescope. It might not change your life but one thing is for sure you will never forget when you first saw it.

Griz

[griz11]

Finally got a set of subs all the way through Pixinsight. Pretty awesome software. Some of the processes I've used so far are very powerful. Redid all my calibration frames using 50 images per. Now they are much better. Way less noise after calibration. I like the way PI will scale them so you don't have to make so many different ones. I just made a couple for the two ISO values I use. Not sure about the color on this yet. I have been having problems getting the color calibration process to work if the originals have been taken with CLS. I've had to manually try and balance them. I'll have to look for something on that but I was really concentrating on just getting a set all the way through PI.

Griz

[ollypenrice]

I think the first image is far better than the second, which has a huge green bias. The first is a tad red biased but closer to the truth. However, you've every reason to be pleased with these. 

Regarding the over exposed core I'd recommend this method; http://www.astropix.com/HTML/J_DIGIT/LAYMASK.HTM  It works really well.

Olly

[griz11]

HDRmultiscaletransform in pixinsight does it pretty well. Haven't gotten the handle on using it yet but a guy in Australia took my lo res jpeg and fixed the center totally with it. After another disasterous upgrade from Windoze my machine was toast when I woke up yesterday. So I'm moving my imaging over to BSD. Took me a day to get things all set up. PI runs like a scalded dog on BSD. There is tons of software available even a whole astronomy platform based around Kstars. I spent my career working with Unix so windows is foreign to me. I just don't like it at all. Today I'm setting up freenas on another old box. Once that is done it will back up on the fly everything I touch will get backed up in versions. And I can use cycles on that other box to improve performance when I'm rendering or doing other compute intensive tasks. Think I have enough parts laying around to build up one more box for a 3 machine cluster. The Austin Astro Society newsletter came out yesterday with a nice write up on my rig. The new hi res sensor for the DEC axis is turning out to be a pain to get installed. Very touchy on the placement. Going to have to go away from the trim tape and actually bolt this one down. The cable puts a strain on it and pulls it up just enough to cause an error. No biggie I have figured out what I need to do and my nephew will fabricate it for me next week when I'm in Houston. Looks like 5 more days of clouds and rain. One day of imaging since I finished up my rig Oh well I've been meaning to get all my computers switched over and the backup stuff done. I have a Seagate NAS but its painfully slow. Very underpowered and it crashes a lot. Took the drives out of that and put them in the FreeNAS box. Its just a pentium IV but its way faster than the Seagate. I think I found a solution so I can use the wifi router as a laptop eliminator. I'll be testing that out next week as well. If it works out then you'll be able to replace your expensive laptop with a router that costs 35 bucks battery powered and software that is 60 bucks. Much rather have a 35 dollar router die from exposure than my laptop.